Newswise — PHILADELPHIA – Penn Medicine will serve a critical role in driving research to reduce pregnancy-related complications and deaths and promote maternal health equity. Through a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. The grant funds the creation of an implementation science hub as part of the NIH’s new Maternal Health Research of Centers of Excellence initiative. The grant is estimated to award the Penn team $19 million over seven years.
Through this initiative, the NIH has funded 10 centers of excellence research centers, the implementation science hub, and a data innovation hub to support research to reduce pregnancy-related complications and deaths, and promote maternal health equity. The implementation science hub team—led by Meghan Lane-Fall, MD, MSHP, the David E. Longnecker Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, and Rebecca Hamm, MD, MSCE, an assistant professor of Maternal Fetal Medicine, both in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania—will work with these centers on development, execution, and analysis of their research, to help bring findings into clinical practice and community settings.
“While there have been great strides and increased focus in advancing our understanding of maternal health, especially in the last few years, without the ability to integrate our knowledge and findings into practice, there is no benefit to patients,” said Lane-Fall. “This is why implementation science is so important—it helps ramp up the pathway from research to clinical care.”
The new grant adds to Penn's robust maternal health research portfolio, which includes initiatives to tackle racial disparities in maternal health, extensive research efforts in immune health of pregnant individuals, and monitoring postpartum health issues for those who are high risk. Poor maternal health outcomes in the United States are statistically more common compared to other similar countries. According to the CDC, more than 1,200 women died of maternal causes in the United States in 2021, the earliest year data is currently available.
“There are a myriad of causes for poor maternal health outcomes from socio-economic disparities, structural racism, environmental impacts, and stress,” said Hamm. “Challenges are as straightforward as difficulty making it to important medical appointments due to job or other personal responsibilities to the management of disorders like gestational diabetes. So when we think through addressing specific outcomes, we need to make sure solutions account for specific root causes.”
Researchers from the 10 research centers across the United States include Avera McKennan Hospital, Columbia University, Jackson State University, the Medical College of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Stanford University, Tulane University, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and the University of Utah. The centers of excellence, a data innovation and coordinating hub led by Johns Hopkins University, and the implementation science hub at Penn Medicine, will work together to design and implement research projects to address the many factors that affect pregnancy-related complications and deaths, with a focus on populations that experience health disparities.
Researchers from each institution will submit research proposals through the implementation science hub. Projects will be selected based on their potential reach and impact. Lane-Fall, Hamm, and others involved with the implementation science hub will support these research projects from beginning to end, assisting in drafting the plans and analyzing data, and ideally helping experts in the centers for excellence deploy their innovative ideas into practice.
This research is supported by the NIH (1U24HD113146-01).
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Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
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